The college football culture: Farm teams for the pros
If players took “real courses” to graduate we’d have little to watch
Regarding Penn State, I think the problem is that it is not so much the administration of the institution that will suffer, but the university and the students.
Football is a business, but that genie is already out of the bottle. Football brings money, alumni and students to institutions-right or wrong. I think that all of these will be a problem for Penn in the future.
Will the measures given out by an organization that some would equate to a supreme council of unequal justice that answers to no one bring about a change in culture. Maybe, but at what cost?
College athletics is full of problems with recruitment, students who are not really students, overzealous alums, etc. Was this the root cause of “looking the other way”? I don’t know.
For me, I love to watch college football on TV (much more than the pros) even if I know that it is not really college athletics but more of a farm team for the pros.
If all the students had to take “real” college courses and graduate, I doubt that we would have much to watch except for maybe the AA or AAA schools like a Dartmouth or Yale.
Anyway, the whole sordid mess is sad and many will suffer in addition to the victims. I don’t know what the right course of action should have been. I think it is a very complicated ethics issue that has no clear cut solution.
That’s my two cents.
